kinda like Batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

An impromptu OpenSuse install

I am not, by nature, someone who enjoys doing the same thing over and over and over again. Variety is most certainly the spice of life. This holds true in every aspect of my life. The Linux distributions that I use are no different. For the longest time, I used nothing but Debian unstable (like we’re talking 4+ years here…). Then at some point I switched and started using Fedora Core, and pretty much enjoyed it except for the annoyances regarding mp3 playback and other minor nits. In fact, I have 2 computers at home running Fedora Core 3 still.

Then, predictably, I got bored with it and wanted to see what the other Linux distributions had been up to, so I installed Mandriva LE 2005 and have been running it very happily for the last several months. And don’t get me wrong–the latest Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) is the best Mandrake release that I’ve seen yet! Very polished, very smooth and very well done. I don’t think I had any complaints or problems with it. For the most part, everything worked pretty smoothly.

And then there’s that one distribution that I have always loved for its stability and polish. SuSE is simply the best distribution around, IMHO, for a complete, stable desktop. The 2 problems that I have always had with it was that 1) they make you pay for their distribution, unless you want to wait a few months until they let you have it for free and 2) the packages that come with SuSE become quickly non-bleeding edge. This, obviously, is the tradeoff one makes for stability.

But just recently, Novell has done a very smart thing in sponsoring SuSE to open up its development cycle and allow the great unwashed to participate in enjoying its SuSE releases, going through the beta process and all. They have created the OpenSuSE.org website and subsequently released SuSE 10.0, beta1.

So today, out of excitement, boredom, and the ever-present desire to see the latest and greatest stuff, I downloaded the 4 cds required to install OpenSuSE and rebuilt my laptop to run it as its core Operating System. I have for several years kept all of my personal stuff on a different partition, so it’s dead simple to install a different distro–just reinstall the root filesystem, have it bring my existing home partition into the new setup and Bob’s your Uncle.

After having worked with it for the last few hours, I cannot praise OpenSuSE enough. It is quite simply the best Linux installation and running system that I have ever seen. The attention paid to detail from the opening splash screen on the install CD to the grub boot menu complete with slick countdown animations to the absolutely gorgeous bootsplash initialization process… everything looks and feels absolutely perfect. Very well done, guys!!

The only annoyance I have had whatsoever is in trying to get VMWare workstation to work with OpenSuSE 10.0-beta1. I was catching a nasty null pointer in vmware’s kernel modules that looked like this:

So, after beating my head against the wall for a few minutes, starting to downgrade gcc to 3.3.5 and the kernel to the latest stable version, I found this thread that looked to be the same as what I was seeing–and more importantly, found that the answer to the problem was to download the latest vmware-any-any-update* from this wonderful website. And, fortunately, it seems to have done the trick. I’m using vmware now and it seems to be behaving itself. For the record, it seems that the problem is somewhere in the combination of the newer 2.6 Linux kernel, GCC-4, and vmware’s module coding.

But other than that, I am seriously impressed with OpenSuSE. I heartily recommend it to both experienced Linux users and also those who are curious as to what this whole Linux craze is about. Job extremely well-done, guys. =:)

9 Comments

You’re perfectly right. I’m now running openSUSE 10.0 beta 3, and it’s the best distro I’ve tried. There are just a few problems with multimedia that can be easily solved by adding a few packages. I’m very surprised since I thought this beta version would be very buggy …

And thanks for the VMware tip ! I’d looked for a solution for a few days !

As far as multimedia goes… I beat my head against trying to get it all to work for a good couple of hours. I ended up following a post I found on the forums and removing everything that I had that was xine-related and installing most everything from here: http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/ and then going back and installing kaffeine, amarok-xine, etc., from yast.

About the only nit that I have remaining with multimedia so far is that xine is unable to use xv as the video out. If I try to use it, I get a blue screen. I had to change it to use Xshm instead and it seems to be working okay with that. I’m guessing that it’s something messed up with how opensuse has set up X, but I don’t know what it is.